How to Light Your Dragon

When the co-directors of DreamWorks’s latest animated feature, How to Train Your Dragon—a mythical tale of ancient Norsemen whose main occupation is slaying fire-breathing reptiles—wanted to make their fantastical movie look more real, they called Roger Deakins.

The esteemed cinematographer of such films as Revolutionary Road and Shawshank Redemption, Deakins has received eight Academy Award nominations in his 30-year career, including a double nod in 2008 for No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. He also has indie cred, having teamed up with the Coen brothers on almost all of their projects since 1991’s Barton Fink. (Deakins is currently at work on the siblings’ latest: a remake of the western True Grit, with Jeff Bridges (the Dude) in for John Wayne (the Duke).)

Though Deakins did some consulting for 2008’s Wall-E, his experience with animation is scant. So how does a man famous for lighting cowboys, hillbillies, and joint-rolling hippies get tangled up in dragons?

“It’s sort of interesting, really,” said the D.P., who over the phone sounds like a long-lost Beatle. “Live-action films are moving more toward the digital world and, on the other side, animators are moving more toward photo-realism.”

Deakins’s expertise in the live-action arena helped How to Train Your Dragon’s animators negotiate the subtler aspects of lighting and ultimately create a film (however whimsical) that feels like it’s lit by the same sun as the real world.

To begin, Deakins tweaked the animation process. Unlike film, which can be as simple as “point and shoot,” animation is a mash-up of isolated bits and pieces that are combined to create a completed scene. This means that one team of Dragon animators was responsible for lighting the harsh crags and leafy canopies that make-up the island of Merk, while another team altogether lit the burly, horned-helmetted Vikings who inhabit it. “I thought that the separation between characters and backgrounds was kind of odd,” Deakins said. “They weren’t lighting in a completed world.”

So he worked closely with production designer Kathy Altieri and visual effects supervisor Craig Ring to create a reference board filled with imagery—including stills from some of Deakins’s own past work—that reflected the look of the film from start to finish. This visual hub helped unify production and keep animators on the same page, which, Deakins said, might have been the biggest influence he had on the whole production. “I told them, ‘Light the world you’ve created, not just the elements within it,’” he said.

Deakins also helped perfect the film’s use of soft light, which he referred to as “the biggest challenge in the animated world.” This subtle glow can be difficult to capture, even on film, because it’s a broad fan of light that bounces around in the frame. For animators, this is complicated by technical factors, like processing speed. “Soft light can give a computer a big headache,” Deakins said, “because it hits a surface from an infinite number of directions and a computer has to calculate that.”

Lighting software can also be a nuisance. “Sometimes a program will allow for the first bounce,” said Deakins. “But to create the total feel of soft light wrapping around a subject and then bouncing off onto something else, you sometimes have to build in another light source to mimic what that light is actually doing.” In the end, a lot of the effect ends up getting created manually.

To stir things up even more, How to Train Your Dragon jumped onto the 3-D bandwagon, adding a third axis to the mix. “The idea was to use the 3-D as as much of a tool as the choice of lens,” Deakins said, “so everything was not always pushed to the extreme of three-dimensionality.”

How to Train Your Dragon stands out from the animated pack because it makes an effort to be simple. The film was lit with motivated light sources—the sun, a candle, even the glowing red flames of a dragon’s fiery exhalation—which meant that in low-light situations, darkness was a tool in its own right. “Black is not something a lot of animated films have,” Deakins said. And while it only seems appropriate for a film set in the deep recesses of the Scandinavian north to embrace a healthy dose of darkness, Dragon uses it more to evoke the sense realism that the film’s directors were after.

In all that he does—whether it’s live-action, animation, or 3-D—Deakins has come to believe that less is more. He was reminded of this mantra not too long ago while giving a lighting seminar for animation cinematographers at Pixar:

“I had a bit of a laugh, actually. I was on a stage with all the things you’d think would be traditional to lighting. So, I lit the set in a very traditional way: with a hard light, lots of fill light, a back light, a front light, and a key light. I did this for about 20 minutes, and then I said, I can’t keep this up anymore because I don’t like lighting like this, at all.”

He panned the camera around and saw an electrician standing by a work light. “Now that I really like,” he said. “It’s just the bare bulb in front of the angle of the face. To me, that’s really good lighting. So I took everything down that I had been doing and I tried to do what I normally do.”